Saturday, December 22, 2012

Drift

I
understand that facts, even of the most fundamental variety, don’t matter now.
We’re past reasoning, so facts are worse than useless now that they have become
a drag on our race to throw ourselves onto an emotional pyre in some public policy
version of suttee. Indeed, you can be
certain reason has been taken off the table when we reach the point where we
are being lectured about firearms by a Brit,* which is the logical equivalent
of letting the North Korean Minister of Agriculture set your food policy.

But even in an environment where all facts have been scraped away and an appeal to reason is viewed as foul calumny, I suppose my common sense isn't quite so scabbed over that I cannot still work up a touch of outrage over the notion of banning something that doesn't exist.

The
original meaning** of “loophole” has long since been subsumed by the metaphor –
a gap, omission or ambiguity in a law or agreement, used to subvert that law or
contract’s purpose or spirit. Nothing wrong with that, for that is the very nature
of language. Words morph and move through the lexicon, becoming something that
they weren't before. As meanings change
and flow, old words are shaped to serve new needs. For those who are after the “Gun
Show Loophole,” there is certainly such a need. After all, if they framed their
goal as “the elimination of one free citizen’s right to sell his property to
another free citizen,” it might be hard to get folks to go along, what with the
notion of private property being a foundation for the very concept of human
liberty.*** Even in today’s America, when you want to erode the foundations of
the very concept of human liberty, you do well to call your law something else.
(Like, say, the USA PATRIOT Act.)

Such semantic obfuscation is nothing new – ask the fellows
at the Ministry of Love. But you have to admire the audacity of the “gun show
loophole” crowd. It has to be at least audacity; it cannot be that they
misunderstand the law, as it’s too simple for that.**** So if the invocation of
the “gun show loophole” isn't the result of ignorance, what does Hanlon's Razor
tell us is left?

They've got a way with language in the South, as I quickly learned as an Ohio Yankee
reporter displaced to lower Alabama. Folks down South know that you can say a
thing, or you can say a thing. (If a Southern Baptist lady has ever told you “bless
your heart,” you might know what I mean.) I learned that if I
wanted to do my job I’d better be able to suck boiled peanuts with the boys at
the firehouse, sip sweet tea with the ladies at the DAR (to say nothing of the UDC), and
listen for those telling turns of phrase that landed soft as down on the ear, but
were weighted with meaning. Folks there had a little saying that managed to
be polite and vulgar and wise all at the same time, with room left over for just
the tiniest genteel threat. It couldn't be more perfect for those craven hoplophobes
now so intent on reducing all men to the same helpless state where they choose to abide.

** A loophole was a small aperture either designed or
hastily made in a defensive wall or barricade to allow those inside to direct
fire onto attackers. If you are a fan, as I am, of movies in which imperial English soldiers succumb to colonial uprisings, then you have seen this field
expedient version depicted as Redcoats gouged holes into the walls of the the
farmhouse at Rorke’s Drift.

***"He who is permitted by law to have no property of
his own can with difficulty conceive that property is founded in anything but
force." Thomas Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, 1788

**** If you make your living as a gun dealer, you need a
Federal Firearm License (a creature of the Federal Firearms Act of 1938). When
an FFL dealer sells a gun, he has to collect certain paperwork from the buyer,
and conduct a federal background check. He has to do this whether he’s selling
the gun at his shop or a gun show or anywhere else. If you do not make your
living as a gun dealer, and your buddy wants to buy your old shotgun, you can
sell it to him without a background check – in your kitchen or at the gun show
or anywhere else – so long as your buddy is a resident of the same state as
you. If you want to send a gun to buyer in another state, you have to get an
FFL involved and he has to do a background check. None of the rules for gun sales by anyone change depending on the existence of a gun show. None.